Google to favor GBase in organic search?

Infoworld is reporting Google’s plans with Googlebase. Their source is a Bear Stearns research report.

Google Inc. plans to extend the product search capabilities on its main Google.com Web search engine in the fourth quarter, in time for the holiday shopping season.

A Google official shared the news with attendees of the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA) Summit in San Francisco this week, according to people at the conference.

When people search for products on Google.com, the system will present them with another search box so that they can refine their query, wrote Bear Stearns & Co. Inc. analysts in a note published Friday.

After people refine their query, Google takes them to a second page populated with product results from the Google Base listings service, wrote the analysts, who attended Google official’s presentation.

“Ranking will be determined by the attributes that the sellers listed for the product as well as by relevancy,” the analysts wrote.

This decision (if true) is good for edgeio customers and partners. We currently automate the inclusion of all of our publishers listings into Googlebase. The more visibility they get in search the better.

And due to the complexities of the GBase APIs and interface it is far easier to publish on edgeio and get into GBase than going direct.

Additionally GBase doesn’t plan to help publishers distribute beyond Google (our core goal). See this story for more.

From the beginning, Google said that Base isn’t meant as a destination Web site, but more like a database to feed information to Google search sites, like Google.com. To stress this point, Google recently removed the search box from the Google Base site.

All in all we are pleased. Our publishers can use us to get into Googlebase easily; and we can be their primary means of being distributed more widely than Googlebase.

However, with our non-partisan hat on, this decision (again, if it turns out to be true) does indicate the difficult “church versus state” issues that Google has. Why would Google (“organizing the worlds informnation”) artificially favor its own listings database over the original items out there on the internet and presumably already in its index? The only answer can be based on financial self-interest. The other wins – structured data in particular – could be achieved by supporting standards based structured data (like microformats for example).

I wonder how Larry and Sergey feel about internal attempts to undermine the neutrality of the Google alogorithm by artificially favoring Google hosted content in organic search?